The tiny country of Liechtenstein, sandwiched between Switzerland and Austria, is home to a street artist called 27, who appears to have the monopoly on things.He says, "There's not much going on here, but at least it's something..."

New design firm from Brighton, Dead Dead Dead are set to be a a formidable player in the advertorial world. Their first showcase of work is stunning. According to Ektopia, these guys have not used and Photoshopping for the above image. Just hours of planning and preparation. Good on them, I say.....(Click on the image to enlarge)

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Zack Brown: Everybody wants to see anybody fuck. I hate Rosie O’Donnell but if somebody said, “I got a tape of Rosie O’Donnell getting fucked stupid,” I’d be like, “Why the fuck aren’t we watching that right now?”

Just in time for Halloween, one of the original independent filmmakers, Kevin Smith, gives us something truly frightening … Seth Rogen in a porno. No offence to Seth; I think he’s cuddly and all but porn material, I think not. Or maybe I’ve just been out of the straight porn-watching world for so long that this is what porn has come to. That said, I doubt I’ll be making a trip to my local video shop later to catch up on everything I’ve missed. What’s that? I don’t have to leave my home for this sort of fare anymore? It is all readily available online at the click of my mouse? And what? I’m supposed to be talking about Smith’s latest mild chuckle fest, ZACK AND MIRI MAKE A PORNO? I thought we were discussing film worth leaving the house for. ZACK AND MIRI is not that film. Maybe you could download it, I guess.

Zack and Miri may be making a porno but it is Kevin Smith making another lazy film that we should be focusing on. See, Smith is hoping that his sensational premise is enough to get you laughing ecstatically. He is primarily hoping for this because this way he can pass off his tired characters and simple jokes as something brand new, something no one has ever tackled in film before. Actually, that is giving him too much credit. The truth of the matter is that Kevin Smith is one of the most overrated filmmakers making movies today. He’d probably be the first to agree with me. This is because Smith doesn’t really care about his work and you can feel it in every cliché his characters exist and every joke he sets up. How else can you explain married couple characters who yell at each other incessantly and complain even more so about how horrific and sexless marriage is? Or a party sequence where the camera doesn’t move while we jump cut from one dancing fool to the next in full frame? And how can anyone these days justify using the word “faggot” as a meaningless insult, tossed around irresponsibly? Limited is the first word that comes to my mind.

Getting back to Zack and Miri (Rogen and the luminous Elizabeth Banks), they are the most enjoyable and charismatic things about this film. Zack and Miri have been friends forever and never have they crossed that scary line and stepped into the realm of sex between friends. They live together, if you want to call their situation living. They’re months behind on their rent; their electricity and water have been shut off; and neither one has a job that can actually get them out of this mess they’ve found themselves in. Naturally, they turn to the world of pornography for salvation. After all, they just found out that they have access to hundreds of contacts on their high school alumni mailing list that will no doubt jump at the chance to see this infamously platonic twosome finally get it on. I don’t know about you but if I was so down on my luck that I needed to make porn to bail myself, I’m pretty positive that the high school acquaintances that teased and taunted me at my most fragile moments would not be the first people I would be peddling my wares to. In fact, they would be right up there with my mom.

The irony of ZACK AND MIRI MAKE A PORNO is that Kevin Smith should feel right at home with the kinds of lower production values pornography calls for. In fact, I think I may have seen amateur porn that is subtler and more original than this film. It is not without its charm or its laughs but ZACK AND MIRI MAKE A PORNO is as forgettable as most of Smith’s work and not nearly as intriguing as actual porn.

One of my fave bands is playing a gig on the 22nd November. Piano Magic are the best band you have yet to hear. Despite being around for over 10 years now, their media-shyness has kept them out of the journo-spotlight and into the studio, constantly churning tune after tune of melodic goodness. Please, if you have a brain, check them out!!!

Their new EP entitled, 'Dark Horses' comes out this week.

Listen to the tracks HERE.See how many incredible albums (plus gorgeous artwork) they have released HERE.

When it comes to Halloween, I was a lucky kid. Certainly a lot luckier than kids since then—and that’s not just the bitter grumblings of an aging GenXer. You see, I grew up at the tail end of the Golden Age of Halloween, when October 31st was all about kids. Unlike today, when adults—perhaps longing for their childhoods—have co-opted it, and a paranoid media has robbed it of its innocence.

During the period stretching from the 1950s to the early 1980s, Halloween was a veritable Autumn Wonderland, rivaling even Christmas itself as the best time of year to be a kid. For all you youngsters out there, this meant that the entire holiday existed solely as a means for children to dress up and get free candy. No one was afraid to open their doors, everyone had a giant bowl of treats by the window, and the streets were teeming with hordes of tiny people in cheap plastic masks and jumpsuits.

My heyday of trick-or-treating encompassed 1975 through 1986, a little longer than I’m comfortable with admitting (yes, I was a bit of a nancy boy). Those were the closing years of Halloween’s Golden Age, and fortunately I just made it under the wire.

Although my parents suited me up from my very first Halloween, the earliest one I can remember is Halloween 1977, when, at nearly three years of age, I paraded down Bensonhurst’s 67th Street in one of those classic old-school Ben Cooper Superman costumes, the kind with the masks that you couldn’t see or breath through, with elastic bands that snapped with the slightest amount of pressure.

Those cheapo 5-and-10 store costumes were the standard back then. In fact, I can remember the first year I didn’t wear one. That would be in the first grade, when I got decked out in a homemade Dracula costume, complete with vampire makeup applied by my mom. I made a deal with my best friend, who was going out as a giant bat. At the school Halloween party, we pretended to be the same person—I’d disappear, then he’d pop up out of nowhere, as if I had simply transformed myself. Pretty clever for six-year-olds.

That was the same year I got into a schoolyard argument with another friend of mine. We were telling each other what our costumes were going to be. Problem was, the kid came from an Italian household and could hardly speak English. On top of that, he had a speech impediment. Naturally, he became exasperated when I had no idea what “The Oak” was. He even gave me a clue: it was a superhero. Batman, I asked? “No, the Oak.” Spider-Man? “NO. The Oak!” I think it took a good 15 minutes before I figured out it was the Hulk.

But by far, my greatest Halloween regret came the following year, when my mom took the initiative and—knowing my love of Star Wars—tried to surprise me by picking up a costume on her own. What she didn’t take into account was that I had only seen the original. For whatever reason, I had missed out on going to see The Empire Strikes Back the year before. So when she came home with a Yoda costume, I was reduced to tears, since I had no idea who the little guy was! Even worse, she took me down to the store to exchange it, at which point the clerk recommended I go as some obscure character called Boba Fett. I wound up picking C-3PO, which isn’t all that bad, but if I knew then what I know now…

By the fifth grade, I kind of knew I was starting to push it. As I pulled on my Ben Cooper He-Man getup, I’ll be honest and say, for the first time, I felt a little bit silly. That silly feeling, however, was still outweighed by the promise of Runts, Nerds, Pop Rocks, Bottlecaps and Jolly Ranchers by the handful.

But my level of maturity wasn’t the only thing undergoing noticeable change. More and more, there began to creep into the popular consciousness a certain wariness about Halloween. Stories of candy being tampered with, apples containing hidden razorblades and so on had been around long before I was born. But for a variety of reasons, they gained a lot more traction in the early to mid 1980s. I think it had something to do with the infamous rash of Tylenol poisonings in 1982, as well as a rising level of crime in urban centers like New York, where I grew up. Parents were fearing for their kids’ safety, and the media was happily feeding into that fear, perpetuating the myth that trick-or-treating was somehow unsafe.

Still, the good times weren’t quite over yet. I managed to drag the whole costume thing out for another two years. For some reason, I just never felt the urge to take part in that other Halloween activity so many of my friends were hanging up their costumes in favor of by that point, a tradition among kids going back a lot further than the modern commercialized concept of trick-or-treating. We called it “bombing”—pelting property and each other with eggs and shaving cream, mainly. I found it repulsive then, as I do now.

There were more Halloween parties going on in those later years, as we approached being what would now be known as “tweens”. My fondest memory of those was one I attended in the sixth grade—when, dressed as Zorro, I spent most of the afternoon talking over the loud music with the younger sister of one of my classmates, who I developed something of a crush on. Sadly, she died of leukemia less than a year later. To this day, I can’t hear A-Ha’s “Take on Me” without thinking of that party.

When I think back to those days, I can’t help but feel a little sad for my own kids. Now, when we dress them up in their much-better-quality costumes, my wife and I almost feel like we’re in the minority in our neighborhood. Almost gone are the wandering crowds of basket-carrying children. Many parents don’t even bother. Those who do confine their trick-or-treating to the local stores, no longer trusting their own neighbors—who in turn, are more than a little nervous about opening their own doors. It’s much more controlled and confined now. The fear-mongers have won.

Today, it’s the grown-ups who seem to get more excited, tramping around from one masquerade party to the next. It’s as if we’re living in some kind of post-modern Renaissance. Some spend much more time pondering this year’s costume than I ever did as a kid. And yes, I’m not above taking part in it myself. But more than anything else, that’s because I miss those days when Halloween was the most fun day of the year. I guess deep down, we all do.

This post was my contribution to a much more extended article on the topic of Halloween Memories by The League of Tana Tea Drinkers that was published yesterday. Read it here.